


Taurus

by orphan_account



Series: Your Experience Dating the Zodiac (a Hellscape in 12 Parts) [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: M/M, Mild Gore, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-04 05:29:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6643204
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>2 of a 12 part series loosely based on the Buzzfeed article "12 Charts That Explain What It’s Like To Date Every Zodiac Sign" - http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/what-its-like-to-date-each-zodiac-sign#.jxVJ8amK8</p><p>OR The one in which Gamzee Makara lives, dies, and lives again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taurus

This is where you came to die.

That’s a motherfucking misstep, your tongue all twisted up in your pan – this is where everyone comes to die. When they packed you up and shuttled you into deep space with a cohort of the biggest, meanest motherfuckers they could find planetside they made it pretty fucking clear that you were all going to die, in one way or another. You remember your own ancestor’s voice, booming, his consonants stuck in an archaic snarl: you are here to die unto your fucking selves and be made new in the service of the messiahs.

You didn’t even know what that had meant. You had thought, because you were a fucking wriggler with no goddamn idea of what anybody was talking about, that if you stood up breathing one day to the next, that it was done and fucking dusted. When they had dragged you into the cavernous pit of a room that stank of blood and reeked of aftershocks of chucklevoodoos thrown around like it was the dark carnival itself, you started to get an idea.

It goes like this: they put one of you in the pit and the rest of your cohort watches. They put a living cull, transported from wherever the fuck they need to get fresh bodies, into the pit with you. You fight it out until one of you dies. Only if the cull lives – and they don’t, they motherfucking don’t they never do they’re too goddamn WARM, fuck, WEAK, you mean WEAK – they just send another motherfucker down to beat their pans flat against the metal covered flooring.

You don’t get out of the pit until someone is dead.

They taught you that much the first night, or whatever the hell passes for night once they take you off sopor and tell you recuperacoons are banned and you’ve got to make do with what the MESSIAHS OFFER YOU, BROTHER because every blessing and curse is theirs to MOTHERFUCKING BESTOW. They taught you because you had been strung out on sleep and high velocity space travel and a welcome sermon that had been like someone hooked up fucking batteries to your horns and just had them go wild. And they had picked you out to go first – an honor, they would give you that honor, you wore his SIGN, it was a SIGN – and put a teeny little redblood in the ring with you, so atrophied from starvation either by force or choice and so fucking scared that he could barely even look at you, and you weren’t tossing him no evil eyes.

The fight wasn’t fucking _fair_. You told them that.

The messiahs choose what’s fucking fair and write it up in the stars, and we are obliged to FOLLOW. They told you that. And they didn’t release the stairs back up to the dais. They stood there for an hour, or maybe two, or maybe a whole fucking week, you couldn’t tell.

When you still weren’t swinging your clubs then, they released another motherfucker into the ring – a greenblood with a limp and a twitch up her spine so bad that it made her brace the wall every couple seconds. She was more collected, but she kept staring at the ground, her shoulders tensed. And then, after another minute, they let in another motherfucker, another red –

One every minute you wait, they said, and you had felt your blood fucking stop in your veins, and you had looked at these creatures who were so pathetic that you couldn’t help but pity them. You didn’t want this. You wanted to kick it with your best friend and your other friends in a place of merriment and peace when you died. You didn’t want to see these ghosts there. You –

They let another one in, a fucking TEAL, eyes scratched out, face warped by burns and she had taken all of two seconds before she swung out at you. Your leaden arms and leaden heart and leaden blood synchronized and you were blind, not knowing you had even lifted one of your pins until it came down over her head with a CRACK, until you saw her motherfucking BRAINS spilling out over the FLOOR –

You don’t remember the other three. You don’t, you wish you did, because somebody should. Somebody should have witnessed. But all you think any of your cohorts remembers is that you came out, covered in four different kinds of blood, and that your teachers complimented you for dragging it on, forcing their hand for more victims.  Those culls’ blood stayed crusted on your neck and the crooks of your elbows and the material of your shirt until someone finally saw fit to steer you in the direction of a flowing ablution trap like some dumb bleatbeast.

The training room still stinks of blood. Your fingers are stiff around your clubs. You’re the first one in - an honor because you still wear his SIGN, it is motherfucking ENGRAVED IN YOUR ARM.

The trick is to let yourself float away from what you’re doing. There’s another side to you, an awful side to you, and if you can convince yourself that it is only him that’s reflected in those wide, terrified eyes you’re about to snuff the light out of, you can escape without going entirely feral,  you think. You can talk to Karkat instead of letting him hear his moirail’s gone pan twisted shitbrained.

The door for the culls unlatches.

You start swinging before you can see their face, before you can witness them; you mourn them in your night terrors, you hear their final rasps and cries and fuck, shit, you can’t feel them die NOW. It takes a second for you to register that the vibration up your arm is from hitting wall, and you strike out again. Fucker is twisting, turning, all you can see is long horns and a shiny glint, you make yourself follow him on those details.

He catches your next pin. He’s saying something to you. He’s saying something and you don’t want to hear, you snarl, you lash out again, for his head. He grabs the pin and twists it right the FUCK OUT OF YOUR HANDS –

You snarl, your claws come down across his face. When you were on planet Karkat bitched at you to keep them trimmed, every time you talk you keep your hands folded in your lap so he can’t see the razors you’ve grown there. They strike across skin and you see brown, you see rich amber flowing out over your claws and you’re so dazed that he catches you with one of them long ass horns, uses the angle at the end to fucking TOSS you across the arena like you’re a rag doll. Your head hits the wall you catch yourself against, and you feel the vibrations like you’ve actually got metal in there.

“Gamzee!” he shouts, and your ringing ears and ringing pan clear out to the sound of it.

Your eyes focus. The pin don’t drop out of your other hand like it might in a movie, it stays in your hand, just another part of dead weight that comprises your whole. Somehow, your feet arrange themselves in this way that they drag across the floor, back to him, and you reach out. Your thumb runs across his cheek, picks up a glop of that amber magic and you stare at it like your brain ain’t quite catching its own drift.

“Send me ANOTHER.” you boom, and the room echoes with it. “This one is MINE.”

The professors up top are looking at each other, you can feel their nervous energy. But they will not sway you. You are made of lead and the dead husk of yourself you carry around. You know your fucking RIGHTS and they will GIVE THEM TO YOU and it should be their HONOR.

“Do you want to fight more at once?” they ask, a stupid ass clarification. They know what you mean.

“Funny, I thought you motherfuckers had FUNCTIONING AURALS. He’s part of my fucking PALETTE. _GET ME ANOTHER DAMN CULL_.” you command, and when one opens her mouth to contest it you don’t wait.

“Never mind.” you say. There’s no glass over the top of the pit anymore, after perigees of this torture. None of you have tried to get out. You leap up, fucking climb the bars of dais, grab her by the robes and drag the motherfucker back down with you. Before long you have her face smashed into the ground, her screams lighting up the room. She’s bluer than you. Inferior. This brutality is also your RIGHT. “FOUND ONE.”

There’s a clicking noise as the stairs to the dais descend. You will not look at the brownblood. You will not look at those big eyes full of shock at what you have become.

You tug your head at Tavros.

“This way, brother.”

-

The first order of business is getting clean. You’ve discovered that if you can wash away what you’ve done, if you can go back to that denial it was another person, you can let it go more easily during your waking hours.

Besides that, your grubhood friend is a fucking mess. His hair is greasy in the way that tells you he ain’t been allowed to shower much on the voyage in. You had that luxury, but they cared about your comfort until you were on the flagship, so it don’t really surprise you they ain’t give him so much as a bar of soap and a damp cloth. He’s still just as awkward and stiff getting his clothes off as he’s been following you around, but you aren’t about to acknowledge it.

You’re kind of afraid to.

“So… Palette?” he asks, and you shrug.

“I’m a purpleblood, if I so choose to take any bunch of twelve motherfuckers to get blood for my paintings from, I’m allowed.” you manage, kind of on autopilot as you say it. It’s a good thing you’ve gotten to take your ablutions scalding enough to just about boil your skin off. It’ll be warm for him. You still aren’t looking back.

He pauses. “…Why haven’t you saved anybody else?”

You strip your own clothes off without answering him, stick your head beneath the spray and let that searing heat work its way into your scalp, your palms dragging your paint this way and that, nails scraping off stubborn bits.  

That ain’t a fair motherfucking QUESTION you want to roar. It ain’t a fair motherfucking FIGHT. But instead you let the hot hands of the water rake down over your body, and you set your head against the wall of the ablution trap, miserable.

“Can’t save everyone.” you murmur, but your voice has gotten so low and rumbly now that it carries past the spray of the water anyway. “Figured if I saw any of you, I could…”

Words don’t come real motherfucking easy to you anymore. Your pusher up and shed itself of them right quick. You’ve barely talked to anybody since you got on ship, excepting those few and far between video chats with your boy.

You feel a horn lock around one of yours, resist the way you want to purr at the keratin scraping up, not at all challenging. It’s familiar, and gentle, and the back of your throat goes tight with the first actual contact you’ve received out of battle since you’ve been here. He scrapes back down to the root, steps kind of close in the trap and you feel a jaw against yours. He smells like musk and grime, but to you all it smells like is home. His fingers dig in against the other side of your jaw and you halfway melt, falling over one of his shoulders and curling up around him.

“I don’t wanna’ be unfaithful –“ you gasp, and you hadn’t realized how difficult your throat was making it to breathe, but his hand is moving around to your back, digging into some of the right stiff muscles there, and you keen.

“I’m pretty sure these are, um. Extenuating circumstances?” he says, pets his fingers up through your hair like you’re the one who just got off of a rough shipment to deep space for club fodder. His voice is soft, his skin is soft, all of him is soft and you want to bury yourself inside of him somehow, ask him to stitch you up there so your hard ass angles ain’t have to show their ugly fucking edges no more. “I mean, I think Feferi and, uh. Karkat would understand.”

“Shit, brother.” you say, and you can’t make yourself pull away from him. “Where’s your little sister?”

Why ain’t she PROTECTING you, you want to howl. She should have PROTECTED YOU –

“With Vriska.” he says. “There were, uh. Complications. Turns out the ascension stations monitor everything, and they didn’t really entirely… Miss the parts that Vriska was using for her space ship. I guess they only had enough time to get Feferi, and then they arrested me…”

Your arms around him are a cage, like you have something to protect him against now, here, in your ablution trap with the water too hot and your face naked as the day you was hatched.  He don’t seem in no rush to stop you.

“Where’s Karkat?” he asks. “I thought they let moirails out to station if you were cerulean or higher?”

“…Not here.” you say, and your voice is a raspy, raw kind of thing. “Tav, I ain’t seen him since ascension. I ain’t going to be able to hold him again, he’s going to DIE WITHOUT ME –“

The trouble with downward spirals is that recognizing you’re caught in one only really makes it all the worse. Like you pick up motherfucking velocity as you go down, stripping away what little order you got in your pan anyhow –

“That’s not going to happen.” he tells you, and he’s got your face in between them hands of his, fingers all broad and tapered.  Those big eyes of his got little droplets clinging to his thick ass lashes, but those amber flecks are looking at you awful determined, sweet but hard as stone. You don’t calm but you still, and a shiver steals away through your body, like that motherfucker is the one with the chucklevoodoos.

You wonder if you’re an animal now. You wonder if that’s why he can bring you to heel.

“Ain’t no other way.” you grouse miserably, and he strokes the corners of your mouth with his thumbs. It’s hard to be naked in so many ways in front of a motherfucker you never got the chance to meet planetside, no matter how much your damn pusher got squeezed round when you was talking with him. But you ain’t got the strength to do much of motherfucking else.

He kisses one corner of it and you let a fat tear fall from one eye, and another. He’s pulled out some kind of damn stopper in you and you want to howl, want to tear him open, you want to fucking KILL HIM for making you FEEL THIS. But you can’t. You _can’t_. All you can do is cry, and shake, and let him touch you. He gets you pressed back against a wall and you can feel the shape of him, still solid even after all that bullshit, the metal of his legs heated with the steam of the trap.

“They brought you here because, uh. Your ancestor is important, right?” he asks. “I mean, I kind of got that from the spiel they gave me before they chucked me into the ring. That it was going to be my honor to be culled by the Grand Highblood’s descendant…”

“Yeah.” you answer, miserably, trying to breathe through your breath hitching. His hands move to your chest, palm kneading out the muscles there. But your body ain’t reacting like it does when Karkat’s got his pretty self all curled on you, it’s just getting hotter, flushing. Reminding you that you got other duties than shitting around and murdering fuckers.

“So, that’s it. You do what Feferi’s doing. Only like. More legal, I guess.” he says, and you manage to blink away enough tears for long enough to really look at him. When you were just messing back and forth between screens, it was all light hearted fun. You guess you never figured Tavbro was motherfucking SMART too. “Juggalos recognize divine order, don’t they? If you can convince them that means you instead of him, I think… You could probably make whatever reform you wanted.”

“Brother.” you breathe, and you’re holding his head, and he don’t even shy away from you none. He don’t shiver or shake, he just smiles at you, kind of shyly, and you feel a swelling compulsion to kiss him.

So, you know, you do. Can’t be fighting all what’s up in your heart. That would be blasphemous.

You don’t know whether he’s kissing you back because he really wants to or just because you’re so damn pathetic right now that the only option other than pure infidelity would be something red, but you’re so goddamn grateful that he’s doing it. It gives you something to cling to, something solid, and you don’t realize that you’re keening needy until he has you pressed back against the wall, legs braced around the sides of his.

There’s enough hot water to keep running considering you’re just about the only fucker what uses it, but Tavros reaches over, turns it down so that it’s just real hot instead of boiling. You keen again, and he strokes your face until it dies down. It’s so good to just have someone who cares for a second, maybe feels even better than the hot bulge that’s curling around yours, tugging it gently.

Neither of you have the kind of bulge that really retracts, but his is thick and smooth, and it feels nice to have it stroking up against you the same way the rest of him is – you wonder how long it took motherfucking Equius to come up with that miraculous shit. Even though this is all kind of going down like one of them really messed up pale-smearing pornos that Karkat always had a fascination with, you can’t stop yourself.

You keep kissing him like he’s your lifeline.

He keeps kissing you like he understands.

That’s enough.

-

Neither of you actually came away with anything to pail, and that was okay.

Sometimes it wasn’t about a destination, it was all motherfucking journey, and you can’t say that you didn’t favour Tavros’s kisses everywhere else instead. You can’t say you didn’t enjoy them palms smoothing across your body any less, feeling the only rough part of him as it calmed you down.

You had soaped up his hair and scrubbed him until he might as well have just been to molt with all that you got off. But this is where he came to die, you think, and it’s only fitting you should help him shed that last layer of self from before. It was a kinder death, you think, if you helped him transition into the afterlife now.

So you light a couple candles, and the incense they give you so you can get your meditation on, and it all kind of smells like too many spices and too much sugar, but Tavros don’t seem to mind too much. He curls up with you on the padded resting platform they gave you in lieu of a recuperacoon, metal limbs still warm from the shower, all tangled through yours like a big heating pad as the rest of you drapes on top of him. He’s got to lay his head flat cause of his big fucking horns, but he don’t seem to mind none, and you can’t make yourself give a shit either.

“Do you really think I can do it?” you ask him, and his hand wraps around one of your horns, squeezing it gently. It’s reassuring, but more than that, he kisses you again, and you’re all kinds of liquefied troll on top of him.

“I know you can.” he tells you, and you feel something bright burning inside your pusher.

You came here to die.

Now maybe you can _live_.


End file.
